How Filip Pesek Built DonnaPro for Overwhelmed Founders

Many founders believe their biggest obstacle is marketing, sales, or demand. But for Filip Pesek, the real bottleneck often sits much closer to home. After starting his career in door to door sales and later building a marketing agency that worked across more than 100 industries, Pesek repeatedly saw founders overwhelmed by the operational chaos that comes with growth. That insight led him to launch DonnaPro, a managed executive assistant service designed specifically for CEOs and entrepreneurs who need leverage, structure, and support.

In this interview, Pesek shares the lessons he learned from bootstrapping the company, building a remote international team, and helping founders step out of the center of every decision.

Tell us about yourself and your business.

I am Filip Pesek, Founder and CEO of DonnaPro. My career started in a very unusual place: door-to-door sales. I was around 20, knocking on doors where nobody expected me, nobody asked for me, and most people were already skeptical before the conversation even started. It was hard, but it taught me a lot. You learn to read people, handle rejection, communicate clearly, and stay calm when things are uncomfortable.

From there, I moved into teaching sales and later built Agencija Spark, a direct-response marketing agency. At Spark, we worked with more than 110 industries, and that gave me a very close look at how different founders and CEOs operate. What I started to notice was that most growth problems were not only marketing problems. Very often, the founder was the bottleneck. They were stuck in email, scheduling, follow-ups, hiring, project coordination, and all the small things that quietly steal the week.

That is why I started DonnaPro. DonnaPro is a managed executive assistant service for CEOs and founders. We connect busy leaders with top EU-based executive assistants, but we do not just introduce two people and disappear. We handle hiring, matching, onboarding, training, quality, and continuity in the background, so the founder gets the leverage of a great assistant without having to build the whole system from scratch.

How does your business make money?

DonnaPro makes money through a recurring service model. Clients pay for ongoing executive assistant support, usually part-time, delivered through a managed service. The fee does not only cover the assistant’s time. It also covers the system around the assistant: recruiting, vetting, onboarding, account management, quality control, support, training, and continuity.

That part is important because most founders do not just need “a person.” They need a reliable support system. If they hire on their own, they have to write the job post, screen candidates, run interviews, train the person, manage them, deal with sick days, and start over if the person leaves. With DonnaPro, the client can say, “I need an executive assistant,” and we take responsibility for making that relationship work.

What was your inspiration for starting the business?

The inspiration came from seeing the same bottleneck again and again – first in myself, then in our clients at the Spark marketing agency.

At Spark, after a few years, we had grown to around 18 people. That was big enough to expose every weakness in how I operated as a founder. I had an assistant who helped me a lot, and without her I would have been lost, but I still did not have the right systems to stop being the ultimate bottleneck.

Then I noticed the same pattern with clients. They would come to us and say, “Our marketing is not working, please help.” We would fix the funnel, run campaigns, and suddenly they would get flooded with leads. And then the chaos would begin. They would message us and say, “Please stop advertising for a month. I am drowning. My inbox is full. My team cannot keep up.”

That was the moment it clicked for me. The real problem was not always demand. The real problem was delegation. These founders did not have the systems and/or the right assistants to absorb growth. That realization planted the seed for DonnaPro.

How and when did you launch the business?

I started exploring the idea for DonnaPro in December 2023. A few months later, I decided to fully commit to building the business. From there, we focused heavily on research, mystery shopping competitors, understanding how the industry operated, and building the core internal team behind the company.

By June 2024, we felt confident enough to onboard our first client. We were very transparent at the time and openly told clients that we were still in “beta.” However, even at that stage, we already understood the industry well and had a strong foundation thanks to my previous experience in the agency space. Looking back today, our systems, structure, and overall success rates are obviously much stronger, but even our earliest clients would probably tell you that despite being in beta, we knew what we were doing and delivered real value for the price we charged.

From there, the company evolved through constant iteration and learning. Every new client helped us improve the model, refine onboarding, strengthen operations, and better understand what great executive support should look like. As we became more confident in the system, we started investing in international marketing, attracted more clients, hired more Executive Assistants, and gradually scaled the business by repeating the same cycle: new clients, new EAs, continuous improvement, and stronger systems with every step forward.

How is the business funded? 

DonnaPro has been fully bootstrapped from the beginning. As the sole founder, I initially invested around €30,000 of my own capital to start the business. We did not begin with large financial backing or outside investors, which meant we had to operate very carefully from day one.

As the company started growing and we gained more confidence in the model, we also secured additional funding through banks and financial institutions. However, even with that included, our total starting capital and debt exposure never exceeded roughly €100,000. Because of that, we had to learn very quickly how to deliver real value, acquire new clients efficiently, and most importantly, retain them.

In many ways, the limited capital forced us to become disciplined operators early on. Companies with millions in funding can often afford to make large mistakes or experiment aggressively without immediate consequences. We did not have that luxury. We still needed to think boldly and move fast, but we also had to stay highly aware of our financial limitations and build a model that could become sustainable as quickly as possible.

How did you find your first few clients or customers?

The first clients came mostly through trust, network, and the work I had already done with other founders through Spark agency. I had spent years around entrepreneurs, CEOs, and operators, so I understood the chaos they were living in. Many of them already knew me, had seen how I worked, or had seen the results of my own assistant system.

The pitch was very simple because the pain was obvious. Most founders already knew they needed help, but they were usually hiring an assistant a year later than they should have. They did not have the time or energy to run a proper hiring process.

So when we said, “Tell us you need an assistant, and we will handle the rest,” it resonated. The first clients did not come from some fancy growth hack. They came from solving a problem founders already felt every week.

What was your first year in business like?

The first year was definitely not pretty. We were growing, but there were many challenges we simply could not fully predict in advance.

What helped a lot was my focus on systems and delegation from the beginning. I understood early that I could not become the bottleneck in everything, so building the right support structure around me was critical.

At the time, my son was around two years old, and I never wanted to disappear from family life completely just because I was building a company. Because of that, I made a conscious decision to keep my workload at roughly 50 hours per week maximum, which forced me to focus heavily on leverage, prioritization, and efficiency.

Our main goal during the first year was proving that the model could work repeatedly, not just once. Finding one great assistant is relatively easy. Building a system that can consistently recruit, train, match, and support great Executive Assistants for different CEOs is much harder.

What strategies did you use to grow the business?

The first strategy was focus. We decided very early that we did not want to become a generic virtual assistant agency for everyone. We built DonnaPro specifically for CEOs and founders. That clarity helped us design the entire service around one specific type of client: busy leaders who need leverage, confidentiality, strong judgment, and long term operational support.

Once we clearly understood what our business was, and equally important what it was not, growth became much simpler strategically. In my opinion, there are only three real ways to grow a business: getting more clients, increasing how much existing clients spend, or increasing prices.

For our model, the main focus was always client acquisition. Upsells were possible, but we intentionally chose not to focus on them because we wanted one clear and simple revenue stream based on monthly subscriptions. Pricing was also something we approached carefully and reviewed only occasionally because we already understood early on what price point made sense for the business.

That meant the majority of our growth efforts went into building marketing funnels and improving distribution. We focused heavily on Meta ads, Google ads, SEO, AI search visibility, marketing automations, and content assets. Once leads started consistently coming in, we then spent a lot of time refining the sales process and improving conversion rates based on real customer interactions and experience.

What was the biggest challenge you had to overcome?

One of the biggest challenges was going fully remote. In my previous company, we operated in a hybrid model with two office days and three remote days, so you still had regular in person contact with the team. You could see people, feel the energy, and notice small things naturally.

With DonnaPro, we leaned heavily into remote first and asynchronous work. We tried to avoid unnecessary meetings and build systems where people could operate independently without constant calls. Strategically, I still believe that was the right decision, but personally, my nervous system needed a lot of time to adjust to that style of leadership and communication.

To be honest, I think it is still adjusting even today. 

What have been the most significant keys to your business’s success?

One of the biggest keys to our success has been long term thinking. From the beginning, we never wanted to build a business focused only on short term wins or aggressive growth at any cost. Instead, we focused on creating something sustainable for both clients and team members.

That mindset affects almost every decision we make, from how we hire and onboard people to how we structure communication, workloads, and client relationships. We are not trying to maximize short term productivity by burning people out. We want clients to stay with us for years, and we want our team members to grow with the company long term as well.

I believe many businesses underestimate how powerful consistency and trust become over time. Long term thinking forces you to build stronger systems, make better decisions, and prioritize relationships over quick wins.

Tell us about your team.

Today, the team is more than 25 people strong. Everyone at DonnaPro, from Executive Assistants to the corporate team, is a committed professional focused fully on their role, not someone juggling five different side gigs at the same time.

The company operates fully remotely, and every team member is based within the European Union. Our strongest hubs are currently in countries such as Portugal, Slovenia, Poland, and Spain, although we also have team members from countries like Sweden and France. That international structure gives us a strong mix of cultural understanding, language skills, and flexibility while still maintaining strong alignment within the team.

What was the turning point when you knew your business was successful?

It was a while ago when one of our team members, who had previously worked at many different companies, told me that DonnaPro was the best place she had ever worked at.

That moment stayed with me because, for me, success was never only about revenue or growth numbers. Of course those things matter, but hearing that we had built an environment where someone genuinely felt supported, valued, and proud to work made the business feel truly real and meaningful.

What is the most important lesson you’ve learned growing the business?

The most important lesson I have learned is that I still have a lot to learn.

When you start growing a business, especially when things begin working, it is easy to feel confident very quickly. But the more responsibility, people, systems, and complexity you manage, the more you realize how many layers there are to leadership, communication, operations, hiring, psychology, and decision making.

In many ways, growth has made me more confident in execution, but also more humble intellectually. Every new stage of the business creates new problems you have never seen before, and you realize that staying curious, adaptable, and willing to improve is probably one of the most important competitive advantages a founder can have.

What separates your business from your competitors?

The main difference is that DonnaPro is not a marketplace and not a simple placement service. We are a managed executive support system.

A marketplace gives you profiles. Then you still have to choose, interview, test, onboard, train, manage, and replace people if things go wrong. DonnaPro takes responsibility for the whole system. We recruit, screen, match, onboard, train, support, and monitor quality in the background.

The second difference is focus. We serve CEOs and founders, not everyone. That matters because executive assistance for a founder is not just admin. A great assistant needs judgment, discretion, communication skills, emotional intelligence, and the ability to absorb context fast.

What advice do you have for other entrepreneurs?

Ask yourself this: if you went on a 90-day holiday with no phone and no laptop, what would happen to your company?

If you do not like the answer, that is your signal. It means you probably need better systems, better delegation, better trust, or all three.

And I say that with humility because I still have work to do there too. Every founder does. But that question makes the truth very obvious. A strong company should not depend on the founder being available for every small decision.

What is your favorite quote?

One quote that stayed with me came from one of my old basketball coaches. He said, “I am here to make us win, not to be liked.”

At the time, I did not fully understand it. Later, as a founder, it made perfect sense. Leadership is not about being everyone’s favorite person. It is about creating clarity, protecting standards, making hard decisions, and helping the team win. You can do that with respect and kindness, but you cannot sacrifice truth and performance just to stay comfortable.

What are some of your favorite books, blogs, podcasts, or YouTube channels?

The books that probably had the biggest impact on me over the last three years were books connected to mental models and decision making, such as Poor Charlie’s Almanack. I find frameworks and systems thinking much more valuable than tactical business advice because they help you make better decisions across every area of life and business.

Interestingly, when it comes to podcasts, I am actually very intentional and somewhat unusual at the moment because I mostly listen to just one podcast: X&Os. It is a basketball focused podcast, which naturally connects well with my background as a former basketball player.

What makes it valuable to me today is that it allows my mind to shift away from business for a while, while still exposing me to high level thinking, leadership, psychology, teamwork, and performance. Many of the guests are elite players or coaches, and there is a surprising amount you can learn from how they think, communicate, lead people, and handle pressure.